M is for Monday

For this Monday. Today. A daily siren sounds at noon at Stinson Beach. I was there today when it blasted, with my daughter and the dog.  No school today – optional parent teacher conferences – we opted no and made it a beach day. An hour later we were home and I learned of the horror at the Boston Marathon. The first explosion happened at the same time the beach siren went off. I am so grateful for this day with my daughter and send healing thoughts to all in Boston and to those who were victimized by this violence.  I am shielding myself and daughter from all visual coverage.

My son and I spent last weekend touring the campus and local beach scene in Santa Cruz. He plans to start college there in the fall,  needed to check it out the living conditions.

Now, Monday, laundry and dirty dishes and snowdrifts of dog hair have gathered in their favorite spots.  Food-like things crunch underfoot as I walk by the piles in the kitchen and reach for the leash, sending our 13 year old Aussi-Border collie  into a complete Bieber fever spaz attack complete with sneezing. If she could bounce on her hind legs and clap, she would.

It is windy and chilly but I am seriously scoring in the sand dollar hunt. The dog is going nuts, hunting eviscerated crabs and chasing anything thrown. My daughter is walking behind me, head down in a hardback library book, fighting the wind to turn the page. She observes with all the wisdom of a twelve year old. ‘You know what the greatest thing is about Robert Downy Jr., besides everything?’ then goes on to tell me some antidote from an Avengers fan page.

Prepping my second son for the launch pad has me slowing down with my daughter.  The time between seventh grade and the end of senior year is a much faster five years than from kindergarten to fourth grade. So this day belongs to the beach, sand dollars, a half and half soft serve cone at the Parkside, and a screening of Mean Girls when we get home. The dog hair, crumbs, laundry unreturned emails and unscheduled blah blah can keep. 

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awkward beginnings

My writing is suffering from self conscious awkward adolescence.  Zits, braces, unfortunate hairdos, gangly, clumsy, hormonal, too short, ill at ease, trying too hard to fit in.  My writing hasn’t found it’s true self yet.

I keep trying, and every once in a while, by some miracle, I craft a really good line, an observation, or I hit a vein of inspiration, usually just as knives are being drawn in a discussion between my teenaged sons about a borrowed Berzerker t-shirt.  A frantic spousal call from the kitchen inquiring as to whether or not we have a spatula. 

I try desperately to hold on to the train of thought at it chugs away, belching smoke, obscuring my path, and I respond to my daughter’s question about planning her birthday party, by pointing out that her birthday is in four months, and we have plenty of time.  I say this a little too loud, though clenched teeth and then have to lure her back and stroke her head like a scared cat until she recovers and tells me we could look at birthday cakes on the computer. 

I had never written fiction before my friend, Ken suggested I join him in doing NaNoWriMo.  When he first told me he’d written a novel in a month I thought he was delusional.  Then I learned about November. I took the challenge.  The beauty of NaNoWriMo was that I didn’t have to show my work to anyone. Ever.  It is all on the honor system, just word count. The story doesn’t have to be going anywhere. It got me into a habit of writing and not worrying about content. Characters changed names, they died, they kept talking. My childhood room was described in detail for no reason.  A subplot developed that featured one of my beloved second grade teacher’s sad home life after she was done teaching cursive and all the ‘kn’ words for the day. Characters ate out a lot and stood up and walked to the kitchen and made tea, constantly. None of it made any sense but that’s fine because by Thanksgiving I was nearing my 50,000 word goal and then my sister went into labor.  This served a dual purpose: one of my characters suddenly giving birth and my knowing for certain that I did not want a fourth child.  Not that it was a consideration at all but it was satisfying to firmly shut the door on that possibility.  I was able to write the birth scene with detail that I could not have described before, having only given birth myself three times, and not having been able to observe all the technical details.  It’s amazing what nuances you miss when you’re in agony. I now had a doula character with dreadlocks to the backs of her knees and a myriad of catch phrases and technical drama.

It took me a long time to dive in and take my first creative writing class, because I was so self conscious about not knowing how to craft fiction.  Crazy circle of logic there.  I would have not put up with such reasoning from any of my kids but I dog-eared class catalogues for years before I had the courage to enroll.  I found total support, and was rewarded for sharing my work, which I had never had the courage to do. 

Mary Allison Tierney's essay The Gingerdreadman is included in the anthology Mamas Write, available at Amazon, or your local independent bookshop.

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